Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Exposed: Inside the NSA’s Largest and Most Expansive Secret Domestic Spy Center in Bluffdale, Utah

Democracy Now! - A new exposé in Wired Magazine reveals details about how the National Security Agency is quietly building the largest spy center in the country in Bluffdale, Utah, as part of a secret NSA surveillance program codenamed "Stellar Wind." We speak with investigative reporter James Bamford, who says the NSA has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. The Utah spy center will contain near-bottomless databases to store all forms of communication collected by the agency. This includes the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails — parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases and other digital "pocket litter." "The NSA has constantly denied that they’re doing things, and then it turns out they are doing these things," Bamford says in response to NSA Director General Keith Alexander’s denial yesterday that U.S. citizens’ phone calls and emails are being intercepted. "A few years ago, President Bush said before camera that the United States is not eavesdropping on anybody without a warrant, and then it turns out that we had this exposure to all the warrantless eavesdropping in the New York Times article. And so, you have this constant denial and parsing of words." [includes rush transcript]

...new pioneers have quietly begun moving into the area, secretive outsiders who say little and keep to themselves. Like the pious polygamists, they are focused on deciphering cryptic messages that only they have the power to understand. Just off Beef Hollow Road, less than a mile from brethren headquarters, thousands of hard-hatted construction workers in sweat-soaked T-shirts are laying the groundwork for the newcomers’ own temple and archive, a massive complex so large that it necessitated expanding the town’s boundaries. Once built, it will be more than five times the size of the US Capitol.

Rather than Bibles, prophets, and worshippers, this temple will be filled with servers, computer intelligence experts, and armed guards. And instead of listening for words flowing down from heaven, these newcomers will be secretly capturing, storing, and analyzing vast quantities of words and images hurtling through the world’s telecommunications networks. In the little town of Bluffdale, Big Love and Big Brother have become uneasy neighbors....

We speak with Thomas Drake, who was targeted after challenging waste, mismanagement and possible constitutional violations at the National Security Agency, but the case against him later collapsed. Drake was one of several sources for a Baltimore Sun article about a $1.2 billion NSA experimental program called "Trailblazer" to sift through electronic communications for national security threats. "My first day on the job was 9/11. And it was shortly after 9/11 that I was exposed to the Pandora’s box of illegality and government wrongdoing on a very significant scale," Drake says. He alleged that the program was inefficient compared to a rival program called "ThinThread" and also violated Americans’ privacy rights. As a result, he faced 35 years in prison for charges under the Espionage Act, but was not ever actually accused of spying. Instead, he was accused of holding on to classified documents in his basement that he says he did not even know were classified.

In a major embarrassment for the Department of Justice, his case ended last year in a misdemeanor plea deal. Now the former top spokesman for the Justice Department, Matthew Miller, seems to be reversing his stance on the prosecution of Drake, saying the case may have been an "ill-considered choice for prosecution."

All of this comes amidst the Obama administration’s unprecedented attack on whisteblowers. "It’s a way to create terrible precedent to go after journalists and a backdoor way to create an Official Secrets Act, which we have managed to live without in this country for more than 200 years. And I think it’s being done on the backs of whistleblowers," says Drake’s attorney, Jesselyn Radack, a former ethics adviser to the Justice Department. She is currently the director of National Security & Human Rights at the Government Accountability Project, the nation’s leading whistleblower organization. Her new book is called "TRAITOR: The Whistleblower and the 'American Taliban.'" [includes rush transcript]

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